“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray.

“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders

While Iraq's other secular parties cosy up to the clerics, the Workers' Communist Party of Iraq (WCP) is struggling to halt Iraq's slide into an Islamic state. It holds coming-out parties for Baghdad girls who shed the veil, and, with reports of women being mugged, it has opened a refuge on the top floor of a Tigris-side bank repossessed by the proletariat. "Congratulations," says Yanar Muhammad, a self-professed "ex-Muslim" and founder of the WCP's Women's Freedom in Iraq Organisation, as she hugs her latest recruit to the barehead brigade.

In the charred shell of the bank below, party cadres plot their return to Al-Thoura, Baghdad's sprawling Shia shantytown, once their heartland but now the bridgehead of an Islamic state. A comrade with a huge bush of facial hair proposes Molotov-cocktailing a mosque for each liquor store or cinema torched.